Posted
by
CmdrTaco
on Wednesday January 25, 2006 @04:34PM
from the nobody-deserves-it-more dept.

johnsu01 writes "The Free Software Foundation has announced the winner of the 2005 Award for the Advancement of Free Software. The winner, Andrew Tridgell, wins the prize for his work on Samba, the Linux kernel, and rsync. In his work on Samba and on a free software client for the proprietary version control system previously used by the Linux kernel hackers, Tridgell furthered what has been an important goal of the free software movement since the founding of GNU --- analyzing ways for free software to interact with the currently widespread proprietary systems so people can more easily move away from those systems."

By congratulating Tridge in the way they did, the FSF shows that it is fundamentally hostile to the world of commercial software, period. This flies in the face of denials from its supporters that the FSF isn't anti-software business.

Tridge's work with Samba is certainly worthy of recognition. It's just the way in which the FSF chose to grant that recognition that I have a problem with.

"The open-source community" is not a coherent whole in any way. Andrew Tridgell was not a licensee of any BitMover software. He just happened to work in the same place as one. No licensee of BitKeeper was working on that until after it was revoked.

Actually, I did, it seemed to be something along the lines of "I would recognise Tridge's work in supplanting Microsoft's Windows operating system with a free replacement, but not his work supplanting BitKeeper with a free replacement".

Because, yeah, the "community" was friends with Bitkeeper and we somehow are anti-commercial because they withdrew their free licensing deal. Or something. I don't even get your point.

McVoy had a license agreement with individual people, that's it. Whatever that "open source community" is you speak of, if I may myself call a fringe part of it for the sake of argument, Linus et al. surely did not represent me when they chose to go with BitKeeper in the first place.

This is all moot anyway, since the FSF never denied [gnu.org] that it sees itself outside of any "open source community", so they would not be part of any commitment of this community to McVoy.

By demanding that kernel hackers don't work on alternative source control systems? By systematically raping the free version of BK? By refusing to export change data in an open format? By continually changing his license to prevent interoperability?

They really should pick another term besides "free", since the one they picked is designed to confuse people...but then, they've been arguing by redefinition for a couple of decades, so why should they stop now?

Why is it that everyone but RMS and his slavish followers think there's a place for both open source and proprietary software in the world?

RMS and his "slavish followers" (I would pick "mindless" personally - not all of 'em are, but I suspect that's what you really meant - but then it's bad to assume) do have an excellent point. The software that's most fair to users is Free software. If you enjoy freedom, and dislike oppression, then using only Free software is a logical decision. Well, so long as you can still get things done...

They really should pick another term besides "free", since the one they picked is designed to confuse people...

Nobody who actually takes the time to read any of the FSF's introductory material [gnu.org] (e.g. the GPL's preamble, or The GNU Manifesto, or their "What is Free Software?" article) will have any confusion about the issue. The people who are confused are those who pass judgement on things without spending more than 250 milliseconds thinking about them.

By congratulating Tridge in the way they did, the FSF shows that it is fundamentally hostile to the world of commercial software, period. This flies in the face of denials from its supporters that the FSF isn't anti-software business.

Assuming you're not trolling, your argument is essentially a straw man. The reality is that the FSF is hostile to proprietary software, which should hardly be a surprise.

If the FSF were opposed to commercial software, I doubt the GPL (the current version, as well as the GPLv3 draft) would say this:

You may charge a fee for the physical act of transferring a copy, and you may at your option offer warranty protection in exchange for a fee.

By congratulating Tridge in the way they did, the FSF shows that it is fundamentally hostile to the world of commercial software, period.

REAlly.

Many people believe that the spirit of the GNU project is that you should not charge money for distributing copies of software, or that you should charge as little as possible -- just enough to cover the cost.

Actually we encourage people who redistribute free software to charge as much as they wish or can. (link [gnu.org])

The FSF makes this arguemnt all the time - but it blithely ignores that you'll only sell one copy, because it'll get given away or shared. You can't make money selling GPLed software.

It depends on what your definition of "sell" is. If "sell" is strictly defined as number of licenses sold, then no, it's pretty hard to live off of Free software. But there are other ways to "sell" your software. Bram Cohen lived off Paypal donations for a while, where those who gave money were "buying" continued developme

What you mean by commercial software: redistribution restricted applications sold for money. Well yeah the core principle of the FSF is to ensure that all software meets the 4 fundamental freedoms. The FSF has never claimed they aren't hostile to that sort of software business.

What they are friendly to is services based software, more of consulting nature:-- one off apps for specific clients (client gets the source)-- custom implementations-- support contractsetc...

A huge number of the jobs have already been outsourced. More and more are likely to be. 10 years ago I could see the argument for programmers trying to stick with pure development jobs. Today what's the point?

Open source software, that is low initial cost and high implementation costs strikes me as a better model for American IT workers than closed source.

To put it simply, well "Duhh", they are the Free Software Foundation, that is their function. Are the Republicans hostile to the Democrats (in this case one could point out they are often criminally hostile to the Democrats) or are penguins hostile to fish or is the BSA rabidly hostile to the FSF.

Hostile in this case is just the incorrect word, the FSF, supports and promotes free software, and naturally enough acknowledges those who make signifcant contributions to it. The FSF has no real business acknowl

from Samba.org...Andrew Tridgell, who is both tall and Australian, had a bit of a problem. He needed to mount disk space from a Unix server on his DOS PC. Actually, this wasn't the problem at all because he had an NFS (Network File System) client for DOS and it worked just fine. Unfortunately, he also had an application that required the NetBIOS interface. Anyone who has ever tried to run multiple protocols under DOS knows that it can be...er...quirky.
So Andrew chose the obvious solution. He wrote a packet sniffer, reverse engineered the SMB protocol, and implemented it on the Unix box. Thus, he made the Unix system appear to be a PC file server, which allowed him to mount shared filesystems from the Unix server while concurrently running NetBIOS applications. Andrew published his code in early 1992. There was a quick, but short succession of bug-fix releases, and then he put the project aside. Occasionally he would get E'mail about it, but he otherwise ignored it. Then one day, almost two years later, he decided to link his wife's Windows PC with his own Linux system. Lacking any better options, he used his own server code. He was actually surprised when it worked.
Through his E'mail contacts, Andrew discovered that NetBIOS and SMB were actually (though nominally) documented. With this new information at his fingertips he set to work again, but soon ran into another problem. He was contacted by a company claiming trademark on the name that he had chosen for his server software. Rather than cause a fuss, Andrew did a quick scan against a spell-checker dictionary, looking for words containing the letters "smb". "Samba" was in the list. Curiously, that same word is not in the dictionary file that he uses today. (Perhaps they know it's been taken.)
The Samba project has grown mightily since then. Andrew now has a whole team of programmers, scattered around the world, to help with Samba development. When a new release is announced, thousands of copies are downloaded within days. Commercial systems vendors, including Silicon Graphics, bundle Samba with their products. There are even Samba T-shirts available. Perhaps one of the best measures of the success of Samba is that it was listed in the "Halloween Documents", a pair of internal Microsoft memos that were leaked to the Open Source community. These memos list Open Source products which Microsoft considers to be competitive threats. The absolutely best measure of success, though, is that Andrew can still share the printer with his wife.

BUT, the real story is REALLY interesting...and I can't find it, now! The story talked about how he experimented with all of the bits and bytes to get the software to work. A lot of stuff in the beginning was hard coded and everytime MS released a new version, he had to rush to fix shit, until he figured out how things really worked.

Shit! I wish I could find that story again. It really explained how to reverse engineer stuff!

Now was this award for his work on SAMBA or his smallish part in the whole bitkeeper debacle that led to git?

I truly do appreciate everything SAMBA has going for it and hell, hats off to Tridge, but is it kinda weird that FSF gives him this award after being almost blamed for the bitkeeper diplomatic breakdown? (especially with how vocal RMS was regarding bitkeeper's use in Linux development)

I truly do appreciate everything SAMBA has going for it and hell, hats off to Tridge, but is it kinda weird that FSF gives him this award after being almost blamed for the bitkeeper diplomatic breakdown? (especially with how vocal RMS was regarding bitkeeper's use in Linux development)

Reading between the lines it seems to be a reward for inducing BitMover to drop their free service for Linux.

Look at the history of who they've awarded it to. You can't call the likes of Larry Wall 'political'.

To say that Tridge got the award because the FSF wanted to recognise his "role" in getting rid of Bitkeeper is offensive, in my opinion - that's basically writing off all the other contributions he's made to the free software community merely to have a go at the FSF. I would like to hear people's suggestions of someone *more* worthy to win than Tridge - I can't think of anyone off the top of my head.

I'm not disagreeing that Tridge is deserving; it's just that the FSF chose to recognize him in part for work that advances their own political, anti-commercial agenda, and that is what I find offensive.

In this context, knowing that you have been recognized by your peers is quite rewarding.He was one of the people I had hoped would win, in particular because of the pro-software freedom behavior he showed during Linus Torvalds' time spent with Bitkeeper. Andrew Tridgell was working on a free software program to let users pull data from Bitkeeper repositories, despite Torvalds' protestations. I think that Tridge's reverse engineering work on Bitkeeper and in Microsoft Windows printer/file sharing is import

This was actually awarded ages ago (OK, more like a week ago) at the GPLv3 launch. I happened to be sitting one row in front of where he was sitting when they called him up (which was kinda neat, I guess). I never did get to see what the actual award was there because the thing was rolled up, and he never unrolled. So it's nice to see the picture on the website.

I'll have to check to see if I have any pictures of the award ceremony. I think I might have one of him actually holding the thing. However I haven't gotten around to dumping my camera yet, so I'm not sure.

They should also be announcing (any day now) the winner of the FSF Award for the Advancement of Free Software [fsf.org], which was also awarded at the GPLv3 launch. If I had been paying closer attention, I could tell you if it was Wikimedia that won, or Wikipedia. I think I also have pictures of that award being accepted.

Sensible, Passionate, Helpful, Friendly, Intelligent, Communicative, Considerate. These are not the criteria for a FSF award, but these are the attributes that comes to mind from the years I have known Tridge. A driving force in the formation of CLUG and getting Linus to visit Canberra all those years ago. Of course he is not a god, but he is certainly deserving of any award the world chooses bestow upon him.

I worked off and on with Tridge at Linuxcare, then one degree of separation with work later on (Samba rocks).
He is very deserving, and kudos for his view on most wordly and out-of-wordly things.
DTC-Bob

First they give the award to a troll [fsf.org], and now to a hooligan [theregister.co.uk]. What's up?

In all seriousness, though, I just set up a diskless router based on OpenBSD that saves its state to flash using rsync. So these awards are spot-on, at least as far as I am concerned. And on the heels of Samba 4, too. Great work, tridge!

Oh, come off it already. Linus was playing in a minefield by using BitKeeper and trusting Larry McVoy. If Tridge didn't step on a landmine, someone else would have. Kudos for him for doing what he does best.

OSDL never signed a contract. An employee has to present themselves as a contracting agent for a company to be held liable for thier contractual actions. That is:1) I work for Burger King32) You work for Ford3) I agree with you that Burget King should promote Ford cars. I never indicate to you I have authority to negotiate on behalf or Burger King.4) You give me $50 and say "I'm glad we have a deal"5) Burger King doesn't promote Ford6) Ford sues Burger King based on the contract7) Ford loses since

This is a GNU/FSF award, not an Open Source award. To the Free Software movement[1], being productive with proprietary software is only ever a temporary measure as (a Free Software advocate would say) the Linux kernel developers found out. By forcing the Bitkeeper authors hand, Tridge showed the world the dangers of relying on proprietary software, namely that you are at the whim of the licenser. This is 100% in line with the objectives of the Free Software movement, no matter how galling it may be to the Open Source crowd.

Of course, an alternate headline could have been 'Stallman Gives Torvalds The Finger.'

[1] Bruce Perens, if you're reading this, don't try telling me that they're the same. Only people in the Open Source community believe that, not people in the Free Software community, and if they were truly the same then both sides would have to agree.

Oddly enough, I consider myself part of both communities, yet I can tell the difference. I promote Free software in cases where it makes sense, but I always promote Open Source. Naturally, in my ideal world, all software would be both.

I understand what you're trying to say, but most Free Software advocates (certainly Stallman, but many others as well, including myself) would say that your advocation of Free Software "where it makes sense" puts convenience above principle, which is the "Open Source compromise" in a nutshell. This places you, at least from the perspective of Free Software advocates, firmly in the OSS camp.You say you understand the difference between the two, and yet see yourself in both camps -- lots of OSS advocates say

Personally I see OSS as a stopgap in between closed and Free. Even if the whole world decided to move toward FOSS tomorrow, we'd still have to deal with proprietary, closed software for a little while, until we got everything cleared up.

Tridgell didn't use the software, so why would he have anything to do with its license?

What Tridgell did was access packets being transmitted over a network and access ports on a computer with the permission of the computer and network owner. From this information, he reverse engineered how the bitkeeper client worked without ever touching the bitkeeper client.

If you think this is inappropriate, i hope you aren't using Samba, because that's exactly the way samba was created.

Tridgell didn't use the software, so why would he have anything to do with its license?

Logging in and typing "help" IS using the software. Please at least get familiar with the major details before saying something did or didn't happen - Tridge was considered to be bound by the licence because he was working for a company that was granted a licence. If I was to consider myself legally free to make copies of MS Windows software purchased by my workplace it would be just as stupid as those who are saying T

Logging in and typing "help" IS using the software. Please at least get familiar with the major details before saying something did or didn't happen

as you yourself pointed out, he telnetted to a port and typed "help". that no more binds him to the license for the software than i am bound to sendmail's license if i telnet to it's port and play with the available commands. If I were to telnet to a public port on a machine a friend owns and play around with the commands available to me, and it happened to be t

Look, all things aside, Tridge was being an asshole. he's like the guy that shows up to a party and trashes the place, since, after all HE wasn't the one that agreed to pay the costs if there was any damage. he's perfectly in his rights, right?Tridge knew the terms under which BitKeeper had been licensed to the kernel development team. And, even though he wasn't using it, and hadn't agreed to them, he knew what his actions would cause. He deliberately forced the issue, effectively making the decision fo

And, even though he wasn't using it, and hadn't agreed to them, he knew what his actions would cause.

How was he to know that? He was just trying to reverse engineer the protocol, why should that lead to McVoy not allowing the kernel people to use it? What does he have to do with the people who have accepted the license?

Prior to licensing BitKeeper to the kernel team, it was made very well known that the license was valid so long as nobody tried to reverse engineer it. He knew that. What's worse, is that he even AGREED to stop reverse engineering it while the matter was discussed, but failed to do so and kept up.

They're actually significantly more productive using git than they were using BitKeeper. To some extent, this is because more people are comfortable using git, so there's more uniformity of process. To some extent, this is because git is faster for some critical processes. To some extent, this is because people have tools for git tuned for their own use (because they can). To some extent, this is because people continue to work on the maintainability of the kernel, so productivity improves over time, tools aside.

As far as I can tell, the switch took a lot of Linus's attention, so nothing got done on putting changes in for a month, but development continued approximately as before, and then there was a period where Linus was applying patches blazingly fast, because they'd been developed and tested while he was doing git (and he designed git so he could apply and commit patches faster than 1/second).

bk tries to be all things to all developers. Git only tries to be exactly what the Linux Kernel project needs. A major point McVoy missed when slagging off the git developers is that a particular solution for a particular problem can always be developed faster than a general solution for all problems. Git being useful for anyone else is gravy.

Well, git actually tries to be sufficiently customizable that you can use it however you want, and it's just that the first set of git scripts people would actually use were done by Linus for his own use. Then they were followed by Jeff Garzik doing his own scripts (he maintains a ton of little trees, rather than one big one), and more people doing scripts for the use of individual developers, users who want to help with debugging, and now people with entirely different sorts of projects. It's following the

That's not what I meant. Your Ford vehicle will initially cost you $20,000 and then you can do what you want to it. In that sense, it is free. You are free to modify it. What I am referring to is that some people seem to expect the initial cost of aquiring software to be zero, which doesn't make sense. Not many people are interested in donating a lot of their time outside of whatever they do to make money, in order to provide people with free software.

A better question is how do software companies get away with charging so much? Software is not like making a car. Once you've made one copy of your software, the production costs to make a million more are tiny (there's a good reason Micros

Software is infinitely reproducable for free. That is given one copy I can make a million more at almost no cost. That isn't the case with commercial goods. This means that in a natural economy I wouldn't use the same pricing mechanism for software as for cars. Rather I'd use some mechanism where for cars I spread the costs out over each individual car while for software I'd need a different economy. Attempting to price software like cars neccesitates a great deal of government interference and the neg